STEP
1
STOP SMILING AND NODDING
Embrace the Rich Bitch Attitude
Every single story goes back to money. I learned that being in the news world for so long. If you want to get to the heart of any story, you just have to follow the money trail.
So, letâs follow the money trail of your life.
Yes, that will take us through the nuts and bolts of hard-core personal finance. Of course. But it also means going down paths of topics like shacking up and taking care of yourself. âWait, say what, Lapin? Those arenât money issues,â you might be thinking. Well, sure, theyâre just topics about men and wellness at first blush, but they are absolutely money topics, too. Actually, to me, those are the best kinds of money stories because you donât feel like you are talking about money. And thatâs how I like to talk about money: in a sneak-attack way, like mixing spinach into a chocolate brownie. You donât taste it, but you still get the nutrition.
Throughout our adventure together, donât forget why we are following the money trail. We want to get to the heart of your life story, the one you have lived so far and the one youâll continue to write. So I will do a lot of storytelling: my money stories, your money stories, the ones that we can all relate to and link us all.
Itâs that simple: financial lessons are more easily digested through brownies and story time. Who said learning had to be boring? So here we go. Itâs time to learn everything about money that you need to know but donâtâor think you know but donât.
Now, before we start, let me make a confession: I wasnât always this confident.
CONFESSIONS
OF A RICH BITCH
Stop smiling and nodding
I was sure I nailed it. When it came time to interview for my first-choice college, I was beyond prepared, like the star student I portrayed myself to be (but I was really kind of a wannabe). I studied up on the history of the school, practiced saying the names of the important alums and remembered the titles of the courses I thought would be impressive to say I wanted to take. I did almost everything to look and sound the part but wear the school colors, and trust me, I thought about it. My test scores werenât stellar, and I had no family connections to the school, but I wanted to get in so badly. I was convinced that going there was my ticket to the television news career I had dreamed of. So when the admissions officer asked me what else I wanted to know about the university, I pounced on my time to shine, asking my rehearsed, well-researched, confident-sounding questions.
Then she started asking me more about my proclaimed love for journalism and media. She asked me which papers I read, and I said something like, âI love the New York Times, skim USA TODAY for good digests and am a closet politico junkie with the Washington Post.â She said, âOh, great. And Iâm sure youâre like me and canât get the morning started without the Journal.â
I smiled and nodded. I had no idea what the Journal was.
A few years later, I was at that school I so intensely craved to attend as a high school senior: the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. By then, I thought I was done with the âfake it âtil you make itâ shtick of doing cursory research and focused on really nailing my work once I was there. In fact, I thought I was the beeâs knees of broadcast journalism when I received a big award while I was a student. It was a big, fancy shindig with bubbly and bow tiesâmy chance to meet some of the people in TV news whom I looked up to and admired, including the legendary Helen Thomas. Eek, Helen Thomas!! As in, the first woman ever to sit in the front row of the White House pressroom. I wanted to be like her with her badass red suit. She frequently got to ask the President the first question he would take. This was akin to meeting the biggest celebrity you can imagine. She was my idol. I worked up the courage to introduce myself in front of the people she was chatting with. I proudly said my name, shook her hand and told her what an honor it was to meet her. And then the group proceeded to talk about shorting the stock market.
I smiled and nodded. I was embarrassed that I couldnât join the conversation, because it was a topic that totally stumped me.
It wasnât until after I graduated from college that I finally snagged my high school crush. He was the chisel-jawed, blue-eyed editor of the school newspaper and the only person I knew whoâd scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs. He was the geek-chic guy who quoted Tolstoy and Dave Matthews in the same breath. He was brilliant, and I was absolutely smitten. We talked about a future together. We talked about the home we would share and the kids we might have. He was the only person with whom I could wax poetic about almost anything (I thought at the time)âpolitics, music, history, philosophy, you name it. Then he told me his dream of becoming a hedge fund manager.
I smiled and nodded. (I thought a hedge fund had something to do with gardening.)
You get the point: there was a lot of ignorant smiling and nodding going on in my teens and early twenties. My younger self thought she knew a lot. But hedge funds, shorting stocks and the Journal were definitely not on the list, and I was too scared of looking dumb to admit it. So instead of asking a question when I didnât know what someone was talking about, or actually looking it up later, I continued to smile and nod, too nervous to confront the topics that scared me the most.
And I pretended all the way until our breakup, when my boyfriend told me that we couldnât date anymore because I wasnât smart enough to get along with his finance buddies. Okay, he dumped me because I was clueless about the subject he loved most.
Getting dumped by Mr. Future Hedge Fund Manager was equal parts devastating and motivating: I became determined to be a person who could hang out with those Wall Street guys. It wasnât so much about the fact that I had been dumped by a boy, but that I had been exposed as not knowing or understanding such a crucial topic. It was like Elle Woods possessed me. I began by reading the Journal every day. At first it looked like complete gibberish. Then it started to look like Chinese, and after a few months it morphed into something quasi-understandable. I was still speaking only broken Wall Street when I got a great and super intimidating TV job offer to be an on-air business reporter for a national show on the floor of the major stock exchange in Chicago. I was beyond freaked out, but I took the job because I knew I couldâand wouldâlearn the language. And I did.
Fast-forward about five years, and I was named the anchor of the only global show on the most popular business network in the world, CNBC. (And yes, that means that it covered pretty hard-core financial news.) By then, I not only understood the language but also spoke it fluentlyâto the world.
STOP THE BS AND JOIN THE CONVERSATION
Looking back, I wish I could talk to my younger self, whom I would have told that some guy shouldnât be the motive for coming out from behind her cowardly smile and nod. I would have told her to figure out that the Journal means the Wall Street Journal. I would have told her that Helen Thomas probably would have respected her more if she had just asked what shorting the market was instead of acting like she knew that it meant you were betting that the market would go down.
Tell yourself earlier than I did that itâs enough already. You need to learn the language of moneyâand donât think you donât because you arenât on TV talking about it. Money speak comes up in all aspects of life: from jobs to social situations to relationships. So the sooner you can understand and speak it, the sooner youâll be able to accomplish what you want to accomplish and the sooner youâll be able to live the life you want to liveâthatâs what being a Rich Bitch is all about.
WHAT IS A RICH BITCH?
Let me be clear. Being a Rich Bitch is good. (Rich Bitches are the good kinda bitches, like Glinda in The Wizard of Oz, not the bad bitches like the Wicked Witch of the West.) Itâs about empowerment. Itâs about taking control.
Being a Rich Bitch means going after what you want in life by getting the financial part in order. Because letâs be honest: you need money to live the life you want. And thatâs what this book is going to help you do. Youâre going to set your goals, and then together weâre going to figure out how to achieve them. My mission is to make you so financially fit that youâre confident to call yourself a Rich Bitch.
A Rich Bitch has the self-awareness to know exactly what she wants from her lifeâwhether itâs buying a house, chasing her dream career, having three kids or noneâand she is fluent in the language of money that is the key to achieving those goals.
The dirty little secret is that at some point in our lives, weâre all scared when it comes to money. Youâre not the only one. I am proud to admit that Iâve been in your shoes. And I am proud to talk honestly about my setbacks along the way, because I made it through a very bumpy journey. And you can, too. I promise each and every one of you aspiring Rich Bitches, Iâve got your back. Iâm going to tell you exactly what you need to know, straight-up without any jargon. Rich Bitch is your Rosetta Stone for finance.
I didnât work at a bank or get my MBA, and Iâm not going to pretend like I did. I just figured it out the hard way. This book is everything I have learned about money, warts and all.
Just to warn you: Iâm going to admit to some embarrassing stuff in this book, so feel free to laugh at me; in fact, I want you to. I want you to be able to smile when you think about money issues. So if I have to be teased for my personal and financial foibles, Iâm happy to take one for the team, as long as you remember one thing: learning about the financial world is not as bad as it seems, and once you learn the language Iâm about to teach you, you will be able to join conversations I couldnât back in the day. Itâs only then that you will no longer feel left out. Itâs only then that you will feel truly empowered.
Letâs get one more thing straight before we begin: youâre not going to read this and then all of a sudden make a million bucks. This isnât financial boot camp. Itâs a sustainable financial diet, one that encourages small indulgences to keep you from binging later on. I wish there were a magic potion but, as weâve all seen from those protein or grapefruit or master cleanse diets, the extreme short-term diet ultimately just keeps us in terrible shape. And when you donât get a six-pack after a day, what happens next? You quit because you feel like a failure.
And we are in it to win it, bitches.
THE FIRST STEP: ADMIT YOU HAVE A PROBLEM
I like using steps for anything I try to accomplish, especially in the realm of money stuff, because it prevents you from having an anxiety attack when you donât accomplish everything all in one day....